Dan update, May–June 2008
I’ve been a little scarce ’round these parts lately. Truth be told, it’s because I’ve been as busy as I’ve ever been with school. Spring finals kicked off in the first week of May, and before that was study week, when five hundred 1Ls scramble to go back and actually learn the last three and a half months’ material.
During that period, my MacBook’s hard drive died. This was, of course, the worst possible time I could lose all my data, and I spent the next day running around Cambridge, trying to negotiate Apple’s repair process for the first time and recover my off-site backups from Mozy (on this, more later). Eventually I did recover my notes and documents, but I had to reinstall Leopard, and couldn’t resist tinkering around reinstalling everything else over the next week or so. Eh, exams are overrated. read on
The horror! The horror!
If I were Tim Berners-Lee in 1980, and I knew that my baby, would someday be used for auto-generated, cut-and-paste, madlib-style record reviews, I might have changed my mind. I’m not lying: I literally recoiled from the schlock:
Here Come The Warm Jets is a nicely varied, mix of 10 tracks that are very well written songs by this clearly talented artist. With many of the songs displaying a lot of the kind emotion that makes for a really great listen. Clearly drawing from what I can only imagine are him own personal experiences. At different points touching on the most real emotions like love, and the pain of failed relationships can certainly be heard. …
My Bonus Pick, and the one that got Sore [...as in "Stuck On REpeat"] is track 1 - Needles In The Camel’s Eye. It’s a great track! …
Brian Eno originally released Here Come The Warm Jets on June 1, 2004 on the Astralwerks label.
Imagine one of your favorite albums being reviewed by the kind of person who sets up spam domains for Adsense clicks. Now imagine it being reviewed by a PHP script that guy wrote.
(Of course, for those playing along at home, Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets was originally released in 1973 on Island, and marked the high water point (well, along with Before and After Science) of Eno’s post-Roxy Music, pre-ambient career. Highly recommended.
Status
Asides
- And now, the most interesting thing you'll learn about Marvin Gaye all day: if you're up on your trivia, you'll know that the snippets of party conversation at the beginning of "What's Going On" are provided by a couple of Marvin's friends from the Detroit Lions. What I just learned is that he met Messrs. Farr and Barney when he suffered a personal crisis and auditioned with the Lions himself. Mercifully, he was cut early on. #
- I admit it: I usually keep Profs. Becker and Posner around my RSS reader just to class the joint up a bit. Rare is the time I can actually set aside twenty minutes to read and digest both's views on an issue. Today's post, though, was one of them: “Should Dogs Get $8 Billion from the Helmsley Estate?” (Becker's response here). I'd love to see a behavioral economist's evaluation of Posner's assumption that "bequest motives are a significant force in motivating people to earn money," but that's my neophyte's response to a lot of law and econ. If nothing else, perhaps proponents of inheritance reform can now answer the "death tax" neologism with one of their own: the "dog tax." #
- This is old, but I'm posting it because it's the best selfmade mix I've ever found on a blog. If you like Devendra Banhart, you should certainly check it out; truth be told, though, it's just a really listenable mix of Old Weird America (John Fahey, Elizabeth Cotten, Lonnie Johnson), Tropicália (Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso), and deep cuts from forgotten English and West Coast garage acts. Plus a couple well-selected pieces of Beatles detritus. Go, now. #
- Just a brief diversion from my usual summer break from updating this blog: I've got a summary of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008's passage up on the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology digest. #
